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Perhaps unrelated. Global economy is fighting income inequality right this red hot minute with O&G glut. Rich oil investors and producers will lose income, but ordinary folks will pay less for energy, drive more, have more disposable wealth, fly more as fares come down.

Also, the giant petrostate [I mean Russia, not Texas] will get creamed. Couldn’t wish that on a bigger prick than Putin.

Austin is AOK. Houston never suffers for very long; I am sure George is not worried. [Right?]

The economy of Houston is broad based, but since 45% of the American petrochemical industry is on the GC, these fluctuations always cause ripples. There are some pretty good real estate buys right now that I think will turn out well for the purchaser – The Woodlands is looking like a buyer’s market for the first time in maybe 15 years.

George – what if the economy is far more dependent on energy production? It is all relative. Russia and Middle East petrostates are like banana republics on oil. The USA, and even Texas, are not. Or so I think.

And, to all of these Millennial Bernie voters: A financial transaction tax isn’t going to get you to a Scandinavian welfare state. The only way you get there is to increase taxes on everyone and institute a VAT. That is how Europe does it.

Are you willing to pay 10% – 15% more for stuff on your same income? We even can’t get much wage inflation in our current economy. Adding burdens to employment is only going to make it worse…

I would also recommend these youngsters take a gander at youth unemployment in Europe. Talk about “What’s the matter with Kansas….”

They *want* to be unemployed. Their fantasy of post college life is one where they sit around in their rent-subsidized apartment (or living off their parents) playing X-box and surfing the web while the government takes care of their college debt and health insurance and retirement.

You and me both, sister. For some reason there’s not an established system to pay 46 year old dudes to hang around and, say, do something super productive like watch movies and play Super Mario all day. Thanks, Obama!

Whenever people compare America unfavorably to Scandinavian countries, they never mention discretionary income or purchasing power, inflation or the general cost of consumer goods and services. I do not know what those things are (they may be way better than the US) but I find the consistent omission odd.

That being said, those social media memes are pretty much just propaganda, no matter where they come from. Truthiness is giving them too much credit. We’re raising multiple generations (especially millenials) who, no matter what side they trend towards ideologically, have all sorts of memes-as-facts in their head that are half-true or entirely false, and even if marginally accurate completely without context yet taken to heart as if the contextless assertions are somehow meaningful. Millenials will be unable to to distinguish correlation from causation, I predict, as memes (the main way they seem to be ingesting political factoids and getting ideological peer-reinforcement) are by their nature without context of any kind, much less contradictory data.

My take on Bernie is his platform sounds great, just as soon as he plants that magic money tree in the Whitehouse rose garden. The funding and cost savings his economic plan describe and predicts, as far as I can tell, seems highly unlikely to manifest, even if his programs didn’t ultimately become riddled with add-ons and exceptions and riders that tripled their expense.

It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the US, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends — which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

Sigh. It sounds dreamy. Why did she move back to America again?

Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the Homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; housing is overpriced; hospitals, crowded and understaffed; schools, largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death; and men in the street threaten women wearing hijab.

Yes, I’m sure all our daily lives are almost identical to life in Afghanistan. Because, you know, capitalism.

The author discusses how even Democrats don’t want to embrace Norwegian socialism, or even understand it. Under the title of “Ducking The Subject”. Which seems ironic, because there is some stuff not mentioned:

BTW, Ann Jones suggests Norway’s main virtue was its insistence that they get rid of the nuclear family, and that’s what Norway’s social assistance paradigm is all about. And now everybody is happier in Norway, because they got rid of the oppressive nuclear family that was making everybody miserable.

That’s it exactly. And not just racial homogeneity. She wants a global homogeneity that does away with the nuclear family and capitalism, and never acknowledges the notion that just because Norway is her personal utopia doesn’t necessarily make it utopia for everybody. She wants America and, presumably, all other nations to conform to the Norwegian ideal. Not necessarily because it is best for everybody, but because it is best for her. Which begs the question: why did she move back to America?

She can’t just love white people, though. Norway has a very large and growing Muslim population.

Norway is about to hit hard times. They have an insane real estate bubble and an economy built on the price of oil… Behind every country that appears to have “cracked the code” for prosperity (Japan in the 80s, the US in the late 90s / early 00s, and Norway now lies a residential real estate bubble…